Gaya Scienza

Small Annoyances

I recently visited the local Borders store in the small city where I live. I like going there, perusing the last releases, sometimes picking up a cup of coffee from the bar. They have a dedicated section of gay novels, although the best gay novelists are featured in the general fiction and literature shelves. There are few incentives today to buy books at large superstores like this one. When ordering the same book at Amazon you pay regularly at least 30% less, and with a Prime subscription, you receive it in two days, free of shipping charges.
Still, I used to often end up buying a book at Borders. I would just find an interesting book and want it right away. You know how it is.
Now - I noticed the other day that the books in the store had small anti-theft devices stuck between the pages right over the text. Of course there is no way to take them off without tearing the page which is exactly their purpose... I must say I hate these devices even when they are stuck on the back covers. But over the text in the middle of the book! I guess a newly hired employee just thought books were for decorative purpose... Or maybe it's Borders' new policy. They reached the conclusion that people don't read the books they buy anyway...

***

I am relieved I have finished Lincoln Kirstein's biography (The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein, Martin Duberman, Knopf, 2007, 736p). I have been reading it, on and off, since Christmas. It's a great book, based on a copious documentation, but I was getting bored by all the information on ballet... I read in a stretch the chapters on Kirstein's Maturity and Decline. During World War II he is appointed assistant to the monuments officer of Patton's Third Army. Amid the destroyed enemy territories they look for stolen European art in secret locations. In a salt mine at Alt Aussee, near Salzburg in Austria, they find the eight panels of the Adoration of the Lamb, the early 15th-century polyptych by the van Eyck brothers, and masterpieces by Fragonard, Watteau, Vermeer, Michelangelo... It was 'incredible in every sense of the word, literally unbelievable, and it was like all the detective stories coming true.' After the war, back in the US, he is now almost 40. He starts, with Balanchine, a new ballet company which will eventually become the New York City Ballet. He meets another of his handsome young lifelong loves, Jens Yow, and starts having more severe bouts of depression from which he recovers in Fire Island. During one of the episodes, later in his life, he assumes the identity of Othello and terrorizes a dear friend denouncing him as Iago. With his wife Fidelma, who was also subject to major emotional disturbances, they made an odd couple. At the end of her life Fidelma had to be institutionalized. In the Kirsteins' innermost circle we also find Paul Cadmus and Wystan Auden. And, of course, there are the young men who follow one another. Lincoln was wise when he chose his lifelong passion for ballet: it provided him, all his life, with a string of fresh youngsters... The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein provides an interesting picture of homosexuality in the arts society of the mid-20th century.

He also maintained a more intense, semi-paternal involvement with a small number of younger men, many of them artists whom he supported in various ways, some of whom had once been lovers or part-time sexual partners (he also still had the occasional 'quickie' - in 1953 with a married Harvard student). He agreed completely with some lines Auden had recently sent him from Ischia: 'All we homosexuals dream of one day being married to a comrade in arms. Our affairs, however, continue to be affairs between officers and enlisted men. Necessarily. Homosexuality is a feudal relationship.' And it's probably true that in the fifties and early sixties cross-class sexual contact between men was more common than subsequently; later, the modern gay movement, initially radically anti-bourgeois, became more centrist in its values, with 'ideal' relationships being defined in a manner close to 'official' mainstream views.

Lincoln was of a generation for whom sexual behavior in general was not considered the central stuff of public discourse - let alone the central ingredient of one's identity - even if privately he'd long been remarkably open about whom and what he desired.

And more sexually explicit:

As with all his young men, Lincoln accepted, even took for granted, that they would be sexually drawn to other young men - and want to act on the attraction. For himself, nearly sixty, Lincoln seemed primarily interested in affectionate cuddling and fondling,  coupled with companionship, with him playing the role of older brother-father. According to Clint [Kisner, Lincoln's latest young man], Lincoln never once had an orgasm with him and referred vaguely to some sort of 'prostatic problem.' They did go to the steam baths together once but Lincoln seemed more interested in watching than in participating. Clint asked him one day if he had sex with Fidelma. 'Well, of course,' Lincoln replied, but Clint took the answer to mean during the early years of their marriage only.

***

The New York Review of Books published in its last issue a long unpleasant and ostentatious review of Milk, full of contempt (Revolutionary Road). Hilton Als is very critical of the script and feels that Van Sant, along the way, lost interest in the story, his aesthetic being 'constricted by the fixed nature of biography.' It's a pity, on the eve of the Oscar Award ceremony, especially when Slumdog Millionaire, the favorite movie for best picture and some other big categories, has itself such a poor script.

***

To end on a more pleasant note, Saturday was the last (great) performance this season at the Met of the beautiful and ambiguous Eugene Onegin. Tchaikovsky worked on his opera while involved in what was to become his matrimonial fiasco. In a way, he could have said himself the last words he put in his protagonist's mouth: 'Disgrace! Anguish! How pitiable is my fate!'

2009.02.22

Lincoln's Bicentennial Desert

As Jean Baker points out in the Introduction of The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln (C.A. Tripp, New York, Free Press, 2005, 384 pp.) there were always hints 'observed and commented upon by historians' about Lincoln possible sexual attraction to men, but they were 'avoided, ignored, denied, dismissed, and overlooked.' Charles Shively discussed it in his 1989 study of Walt Whitman published by the Gay Sunshine Press. In 2001 Jonathan Ned Katz lengthily described Lincoln's relationship with Joshua Speed, with whom he lived during four years in Springfield, both sharing the same bed, in his book Love Stories: Sex Between Men Before Homosexuality. Tripp's controversial book is highly speculative, but it is, to date, the 'most systematic' investigation of Lincoln's sexual interests. And for most parts it's a page turner.

Tripp researched the book in the 90s. He died in May 2003, while still working on the manuscript. The book was edited after his death. It is clearly no finished, left with statements which decrease its credibility. Alfred Kinsey's dated ideas about sexuality as well as the author's own modern gay frame of mind are overused in Tripp's analysis. Maybe this explains why the book has been ignored, while so many others have been reprinted for the celebration of the bicentennial of Lincoln's birth, this week.

Tripp was born in Texas in 1919, and worked with Alfred Kinsey after World War II. Later he went back to college and eventually got a doctorate in clinical psychology. He then worked as a psychotherapist in New York City. In 1975 he published his first book, The Homosexual Matrix, which became a bestseller.

What seems amazing is that even the most recent biographers continue to ignore the topic of Lincoln's intimacy with men. In the New York Times Review of Books, last Sunday, former famous columnist William Safire makes some recommendations about recent books on Lincoln (Lincoln Monuments). Not even a hint to our topic. I am not claiming that this is a major topic. I have no qualifications to even risk an opinion. It is just shocking that it is ignored.

Jean Baker, a professor of history at Goucher College who published a biography of Lincoln's wife Mary in 1987, concludes: 'Yet while Tripp may be wrong in his interpretation of some particulars, he may still be right on the larger question. For myself, I believe that Lincoln was bisexual. The evidence from the Joshua Speed and David Derickson incidents, one occurring when Lincoln was in his late twenties and the other when he was fifty-three, suggests that he engaged in both heterosexual and homosexual practices and that his attraction to men did not end with his marriage. I also believe that he loved his wife, Mary, and I know that he had sexual intercourse with her.'

But Jean Baker was wrong when she wrote: 'Many will applaud efforts to answer questions that threaten to obscure all others, on the eve of the bicentennial celebration in 2009 of Lincoln's birth.' I haven't seen a threat in the multitude of books published or reprinted recently. As alluded to by the epigraph of Tripp's book, we might have to wait for the next generation of Lincoln scholars...

2009.02.15

Bits and Pieces

After The Washington Post's recent decision to discontinue its weekly stand-alone supplement of book reviews, Book World, another sad news reaches us this week. The Oscar Wilde Bookshop, the venerable Greenwich Village landmark, the oldest and most famous gay and lesbian bookstore in the world, will definitively close at the end of March. It's, no doubt, the end of an era...

There is an interesting paper by Edmund White in the last issue of the New York Review of Books on the American writer Glenway Wescott (1901-1987). He is best known for his novella The Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story, which is 'ranked as one of the best American short novels along with William Faulkner's The Bear, Katherine Anne Porter's Noon Wine, Herman Melville's Billy Budd, and Henry James's The Turn of the Screw.' In 1919 he met his lifelong partner, Monroe Wheeler. They lived together until Wescott's death, although Wescott remained in the closet in his published work. He stopped writing fiction after 1945, maybe because, as White suggests, 'he was too closeted to tackle his real subject, homosexuality, though in fact he did write in 1938 an entirely successful long short story called A Visit to Priapus that he refused to have published till after his death.' Excerpts from his journals were published in 1990 (Continual Lessons : The Journals of Glenway Wescott 1937-1955, edited by Robert Phelps with Jerry Rosco, New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1990, 410 pp.). They are, White remarks, 'full of gossip. Wescott says he is avoiding Thornton Wilder because of his dirty fingernails and his hypocrisy about his homosexuality.'

Which brings me to The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder (edited by Robin G. Wilder & Jackson R. Bryer, New York, Harper, 2008, 730 pp.) published last fall. There were few reviews (A Man Who Knew Everyone by Alexander Theroux in the Wall Street Journal, The American Loneliness by Christopher Benfey in The New Republic). The book is well annotated. Each section is introduced by a short summary of the major events of Wilder's life during the period. What strikes from reading the three hundred letters presented here (out of the more than seven thousand known letters) is the little we get about Wilder's intimate life. Nowhere in the volume is any reference made to his homosexuality. In the foreword, Scott Donaldson writes: 'Wilder was a bachelor all his life, with a series of young male protégés. Did he love this one, or that? There are only hints here (...),' and after noting that 'Thornton Wilder has been somewhat unlucky in his biographers,' he expresses the hope that the situation will 'change with the arrival of Penelope Niven's book.' Alexander Theroux notices in his review:

Nowhere in The Selected Letters is there anything approaching a love letter. The biographer Gilbert A. Harrison, in The Enthusiast: A Life of Thornton Wilder (1983), cites the views of Samuel Steward, an intimate friend of Wilder's who is now generally acknowledged to have been his lover. Steward assumed that, for Wilder, all same-sex acts were "unspeakable." Mr. Harrison goes on: "If one accepts the essentials of Steward's story . . . the sexual act was so hurried and reticent, so barren of embrace, tenderness or passion that it might never have happened."

For the last time this season Orfeo ed Euridice, the great Gluck's opera, was performed at the Met Saturday last week. For a modern viewer this is a very ambiguous work. Orfeo's score was composed for a castrato, but today the role is generally sung by a female contralto or a mezzo-soprano, as was the case at the Met (a wonderful Stephanie Blythe). The love duets produce a strange impression. The third character of the opera, Amore (Cupid), is also sung by a soprano... To increase our confusion the choreographer has composed a ballet which features, at the end of act III, 'odd' couples dancing: two males, two females, and a male with a female dressed as a male, among other couples...

The Chevalier d'Éon, the famous spy and homme de lettres et d'épée of late eighteenth-century France, was also ambiguous, as reminds us a new biography published in French (Le Chevalier d'Éon: une vie sans queue ni tête, Evelyne et Maurice Lever, Paris, Fayard, 2009, 396 pp.). Maurice Lever who died in 2006 was Beaumarchais's biographer. He is also the author of Les Bûchers de Sodome, a history sodomy.

I am still in the middle of Duberman's biography of Lincoln Kirstein. It is full of details on ballet, sadly not my favorite topic... At the end of the 30s, Lincoln seems to have found his place at the helm of the School of American Ballet. He is still ambivalent about his sexuality (and will be, it seems, all his life), although he confides in his diary, as recorded by Duberman, that the erotic charge of having sex with a long time female companion was 'like a warm bath' compared to the excitement he often felt with men. He has met Pete Martinez, a 'twenty-year-old student at the school' who 'would become one of the great loves of his life' and Paul Cadmus through whom he will soon meet his future wife, Fidelma, the painter's sister.

2009.02.08

Pilcrow by Adam Mars-Jones

Coming-of-age novels are often entertaining and strike a sentimental chord among readers, but they rarely leave a profound and durable print. Exceptions are some of the greatest novels of all time, like Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Magic Mountain.

When you close Pilcrow (Adam Mars-Jones, London, Faber & Faber, 2008, 525 pp.) after reading its last paragraph you feel excited, happy, full, and at the same time puzzled. And you want to start reading it again, right then. Which is the sign of a great book. It happens for example at the end of Remembrance of Things Past, which is not a lesser reference than the novels previously mentioned...

There is a discrepancy between the beginning of the novel and its end, as if a second volume would follow... And maybe it will. Hopefully (In an interview with Jasper Rees in the Telegraph, April 4th 2008, Mars-Jones reveals that Pilcrow is the first in a projected trilogy). When the book opens, John Cromer, the narrator, 'years and years later,' remembers the spring when he learned to drive. It was 1968 and he was 18 years old:

The spring I learned to drive, the cherry tree in front of our house on Bourne End flowered as never before. It was 1968. Driving meant a lot to me as an idea. I felt that mastery of a car was a big step on the way to mastery of a life.

From there John Cromer takes us back from his birth to his adolescence in this captivating bildungsroman. When the volume ends, he is 15 years old, and we have not closed the gap with the first pages, which, by then, have become a puzzle.

The novel is beautifully written as a memoir by an adult often adopting a child's perspective with a fine sense of humor, underlined by great intelligence, and psychological acumen. And no sentimentalism.

After his birth John 'was a text-book healthy baby, a magazine-cover specimen of infant.' But his life only really begins when he is about 3 years old:

My life began with a fever. The pain came only at night, to start with. Starting in the knee. Hot and dizzy. At two in the morning I'd be screaming, then by breakfast-time I would almost have forgotten. All childhood illnesses are dramatic, but this was more dramatic than most. I would scream for quite a while without stopping, and I couldn't bear for my knee to be touched. Mum gave me aspirin, so many that once I saw two Mums coming into the room.

After spending some time in the hospital he is sent home with a diagnosis, rheumatic fever, and a treatment, strict bed rest. I cannot resist but read aloud some more, showing the author's precise prose, humor and intelligence:

I had my diagnosis, or rather Mum and Dad did. But diagnosis without cure or even treatment is cold comfort. There was nothing to be done for me. To be more accurate: nothing was to be done by me. I was to do nothing. In rheumatic fever it is the heart that gives concern. Permanent damage can be done to it. Additional strain must be avoided.

If you're a patient who isn't positively going to die, so that sooner or later your condition is likely to improve, then the chances are you'll be on the receiving end of whatever treatment is currently the fashion. In the seventeenth century I would have been bled. In the 1950s the prevailing wisdom required no special equipment. I was simply put to bed. Bed with no supper was a punishment. Until you say you're sorry. Bed res till you're better was doctors' orders, however long it took.

John is confined to his yellow roses wallpapered bedroom. His interaction with the world is limited to his impoverished middle-class parents, a younger brother, Peter, his grandmother, the doctor, the cleaning girl and a teacher coming several times a week to their house when he reaches the age of five, all extraordinarily sketched. Of course the diagnosis was wrong. What the young boy has in fact is a rare condition called Still's Disease, a severe form of juvenile idiopathic arthritis. While both Still's Disease and rheumatic fever are untreatable conditions, as the narrator explains, staying as motionless as possible, as he had, was the worst imaginable thing for the former: 'A boy with Still's Disease had different obligations. His job would have been to keep his limbs in constant gentle movement, so as to minimize the sizing up of the joints.' It leaves poor young narrator in a crippled state difficult to imagine. He has become the pilcrow of the title: ¶, immobilized by the stiffening of most of his joints in an elongated position which not only physically resembles the strange typographic character: 'I'm not sure I can claim to have taken my place in the human alphabet, even as its honorary twenty-seventh letter. I'm more like a specialised piece of punctuation, a cedilla, umlaut or pilcrow, hard to track down on the keyboard of a computer or typewriter.'

John spends the following years in specialized institutions, first the Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital in Buckinghamshire County, west of London, then the fictional Vulcan School. Through light strokes we are provided with a description of his terrifying condition, en passant, without any sentimentalism. The portraits of the hospital staff, nurses, doctor, matrons, teachers, fellow boys and girls are sometimes cruel, always psychologically sound, and often funny. John's character and cleverness make him a very likable and attaching character.

The other ongoing theme in the novel is that John is gay. Hints are provided, initially subtle, starting in the first pages. It is never felt as an issue by him, at least in this volume, despite the era in which the novel is set... When he grows up his sexual urges increase. But what can the sexuality of a crippled boy, unable to care for himself in the most simple situations of life, be? How can a disable gay young man get 'to mastery of his life?'

Adam Mars-Jones is an English writer born in London in 1954. Lantern lecture, his first collection of stories appeared in 1981. It was followed in 1992 by Monopolies of Loss, a collection of short stories about Aids, some of which were previously published, together with two short stories by Edmund White, in The Darker Proof: Stories from a Crisis. In 1993 he published a short novel, The Waters of Thirst, recounting the life of a gay man with a congenital kidney disease. Mars-Jones has also published a collection of essays, Blind Bitter happiness (1997).

Pilcrow is his most ambitious novel to date. A masterpiece in the making? How strange that no American edition is available...

2009.02.01